The Larger-Than-Life Highlights of Art Basel’s Unlimited Sector

Opening a day before the main fair at Art Basel, the Unlimited sector is devoted to displaying gigantic, bright-hued, deeply ambitious, booth-bursting works that are so epic in scale as to inspire … a whole lot of double-taps on Instagram. And Basel undoubtedly will offer thousands of photo-worthy opportunities as the week goes on, both in and outside the main fair. Design/Miami is opening up across the street from Unlimited, with Standard Hotels head honcho Andre Balazs acting as curator of design at large. The hippest young kids show at Liste just across town, including the New York shops Essex Street and Bushwick’s Clearing. And of course there are the high-octane art dinners and parties: the trek out to the Foundation Beyeler, the salon between Tina Brown and Tino Sehgal followed by a feast at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Tolga Albayrak’s globetrotting art bash Tolga’s Fair Club and countless lavish nights at the city’s crown jewel, the Grand Hotel Trois Rois.

At Unlimited, it’s hard to miss Ai Weiwei’s “Stacked”: an incomprehensible tower of bicycles, all the spokes and wheels linked up in metal towers. Less playful but even more arresting is Kader Attia’s “Arab Spring,” in which the artist recreated the destruction of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo by destroying his own glass-filled installation with bricks and then leaving the carnage as the finished piece. Two other works also feature revolution as a motif, though in a more literal sense: Julius von Bismarck’s “Egocentric System,” which features the artist sitting on a platform that goes around and around, sometimes reading at a desk and sometimes lying in a bed, and Günther Uecker’s “Sandmühle (Sand Mill),” which involves a rotor-powered rake making circles in sand.

Leigh Ledare’s “Double Bind” is, in the artist’s words, “a conceptual project,” which features hundreds of pictures of the same woman. Who was she? “I was married to Megan for five years, then divorced for five years, then I asked her to go to a cabin with me in upstate New York, so I could take pictures of her,” Ledare says. “But then she got married, so I asked her to go up to the same cabin with her new husband — and have him take pictures, too.” Ledare’s photos and the ones taken by his ex-wife-slash-muse’s new husband — got that? — are placed right next to each other.

Ryan McGinley’s “Yearbook” booth plasters the walls and ceiling with his characteristically ebullient images of Adonises and pretty girls — all cool downtown kids, and all in the nude. When it opened at Team Gallery in September, it seemed like everyone in the photos was also there in the crowd. The VIP opening was a slightly different scene. “It’s cool that I don’t know 98 percent of the people here,” McGinley said as a quite elderly Swiss woman in a wheelchair, white poodle in her lap, was rolled by. “Like, take this lady here, with the dog. Seeing her into it is so cool.”